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IT’S WHAT HE WOULD HAVE WANTED

There is little doubt that Jeffrey Epstein was, at the very least, an Israeli intelligence asset who collected ‘kompromat’ on powerful figures. The files show his close relationships with the Israeli political and military elite, how a senior Israeli intelligence officer stayed at Epstein’s place on multiple occasions between 2013 and 2016, how the Israeli government installed security equipment and controlled access to a Manhattan apartment building where Epstein housed underage girls. They show Epstein’s funding of Israeli groups, including ‘Friends of the IDF’, the settler org the Jewish National Fund, as well as his ties to members of Israel’s overseas intelligence services. And FBI sources in the files claim he was an Israeli spy, just like his lawyer.

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STORMZY SOLD OUT

As Israel ramped up it’s genocide in Gaza, bombing civilians indiscriminately and cutting off food and water to 2.2 million people, McDonalds in Israel gave out free food to soldiers doing the killing and offered a 50% discount to anyone taking part in the massacre. In response, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement called for a boycott of McDonald’s. McDonalds Malaysia responded with a $1.3 million lawsuit against the BDS campaign.

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COCA-COLA: “REUSE – REDUCE – BURN”

I spotted these stickers on the caps of Coca-Cola bottles in my local supermarket. Coca-Cola is the world’s largest plastic polluting company and over half of UK plastic “recycling” is exported to be burned or dumped abroad. The focus on “recyclability” of plastics is a marketing greenwash strategy. Most plastic is never recycled and is either burned or dumped in the global south where it breaks down over years and centuries into irremovable micro plastic pollution that is making its way into our environment, food, bodies and bloodstreams. Coke is also the target of a BDS boycott for operating factories on stolen Palestinian land, and a boycott called by workers of bottling plants in South America whose union organisers have been tortured and murdered by the company. If anyone wants a sheet of these stickers (in red and black) you can order them at cost price here: https://www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/product-page/please-export-me-to-be-burned-abroad-coca-cola-bottle-stickers

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COCA-COLA

First new work of the year in support of the ongoing BDS boycott of Coca Cola products, and in recognition also of Coca-Cola’s murderous repression of union organisers in South America. In 2017, Coca Cola donated $14000 to the extremist Israeli far-right organisation Im Tirtzu, which aims to “promote Zionism” by attacking and delegitimising Israeli left-wing and human rights groups and individuals. Coke also operates facilities in Atarot, an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Coca-Cola has been accused of having union organisers murdered in several countries. In Guatemala City, while workers at a company bottling planet fought for their jobs, including occupying the plant for 13 months, three General Secretaries of their union were murdered and five other workers killed. Four more were kidnapped and have disappeared. Torture and intimidation were also used against union members. Coke also had at least a dozen union organisers killed in Colombia.

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LITTLE AMERICA

Beyond US military and economic support for Israel as its imperial outpost in the region, an estimated 160,000 Americans live in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and are some of the most active participants in the ongoing campaign of terror against the indigenous Palestinian population. Israeli settler terrorism as a movement also draws inspiration from two Americans infamous as the godfathers of the campaign of settler violence against ordinary Palestinians.

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UK GOVT SAYS I’M AN “EXTREMIST”

Novara has reported that John Woodcock AKA Lord Walney, the government’s nominally “independent” advisor on political extremism, sent a dossier to the home secretary, following allegations of abuse during the general election, which included my “Vote for Genocide” poster as an example of a “concerted campaign by extremists”. You can still download the poster for free from my website here.

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BARCLAYS X WIMBLEDON

I designed this poster as part of a new campaign by Brandalism taking over more than 300 commercial billboard, tube and bus shelter ads near the Wimbledon tennis tournament. “According to experts, Barclays is Europe’s largest funder of fossil fuels since 2016, and is a major lender to weapons companies supplying Israel. Last year alone, Barclays provided over £17.5 billion to fossil fuel companies driving up emissions and pollution, a 10% increase on the year before. Since 2019, they have provided over £6 billion in loans and underwriting to companies supplying Israel with weapons and military technology.” [Link]

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MAKE THE DESERT BLOOM

The Zionist myth that Israeli settlers “made the desert bloom” is as inaccurate as the one that Israel was a “land without a people for a people without a land”.⁠ As we can see in Gaza and the West Bank, the process of stripping the land of its people, and reducing cultivated land to slashed and burned wasteland, requires extensive, brutal violence. Olive groves that have been propagated for centuries are torn down by Israeli settlers, water sources are filled with concrete, and farmers are driven from their homes.⁠ In the 1948 Nakba, at least half of the Arab population of Palestine, (700,000 people,) were driven from their homes, and forbidden from returning. Villages were razed, and archaeological sites destroyed. There has been a deliberate attempt by the Israeli state to make its claim of a “land without a people” a retrospective reality. As they will attempt to do with Gaza, after this Second Nakba.⁠ According to Decolonizing Palestine: “The vast majority of cultivated agricultural land in Israel today was already being cultivated by Palestinians before their ethnic cleansing… On the eve of the 1948 war, around 739,750 acres of land were being cultivated by Palestinians. These cultivated lands were so vast, that they were “greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.” The agricultural core of the Israeli state consists of cultivated farmland that was stolen from Palestinian refugees after their ethnic cleansing.”⁠ Colonial ideology has always needed to believe that conquered peoples were idle, ignorant and backwards, unable to manage their own resources, and always requiring Western intervention to improve and utilize the land beneath their feet. The more we learn about the civilisations that European colonialism has destroyed, the more we discover that we were simply importing our own ignorance […]

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WAKE UP AND SMELL THE GENOCIDE

I feel numb from this week’s news. From yesterday’s Israeli Flour Massacre of over 112 starving Palestinians who were simply trying to get food from aid trucks, to the unbearably sickening photo being passed around an Israeli telegram channel of one of the victims who has been zip-tied as a prisoner and then flattened into unrecognisable human paste by an Israeli tank. Every time I feel like we have reached a high-water mark of horror and suffering in Gaza, Israel raises the threshold of just how much barbarism Western politicians and journalists can apparently accept and attempt to justify. Added to this, earlier in the week to see the video of USAF air man Aaron Bushnell setting fire to himself outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C as he screamed “Free Palestine” until he collapsed and died. He showed courage and commitment that I cannot fathom and I simply cannot shake the image from my mind of him shouting those words even as the flames entered his throat and burned his tongue. It was an unbelievably harrowing reminder of what has been done to tens of thousands of children, all in our name, with weapons made in our countries. The images of atrocity and barbarism that make it out of Gaza only remind us of what untold and undocumented horrors the people of Palestine have endured and will continue to endure because politicians in the West are complicit cowards in upholding American Empire. Israel being the American Empire’s most strategically important Imperial outpost. We need to make sure that those who are complicit in these crimes are never allowed to forget it. All the politicians who lined up to defend this genocide must be crammed into the dustbin of history. Instead of your vote, give them your contempt. Let them […]

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THIS IS ISRAEL

100,000 people killed, injured, or missing In Gaza (January 2024) “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” – Howard Zinn Colonisation and genocide go hand in hand. It’s impossible to read about European colonialism and not see the parallels with the Israeli state and how it acts towards the supposedly ‘barbaric’ people it has colonised. Not least in the way the coloniser regards itself as a shining beacon of civilisation on a dark continent, even while it unleashes incredible violence against defenceless civilians. The destruction of farms and wells, forced deportations, indigenous people as second-class citizens in their own land. There is nothing really new here except the technology of murder. This is Empire, red in tooth and claw. When European and North American nations cannot see genocide happening in Palestine, it’s because they are unable to see it in their own story either. If what Israel is doing is genocidal, then maybe what we did was too? Maybe we’d have to stop pretending that it was only a handful of enemy regimes that engaged in genocidal policies against ‘undesirable’ peoples. And then we’d have to stop skipping those pages of the history we tell ourselves.

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NEVER AGAIN*

Never again means just that. No nation or people gets a free pass to carry it out. There are no extenuating circumstances that excuse it. There is no “but…”. Never again means never again for anybody.⁠ ⁠ Germany’s support at the ICJ for Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza shows that they haven’t really learned anything from their own history of genocide.⁠ ⁠ The way history is told makes the Nazis seem like an aberration in German and European history, but fascism and European colonialism are intrinsically linked. Nazi eugenics carried on the lineage of colonial “scientific racism” that had been used to justify slavery; Before concentration camps came to Europe, they were first brought to South Africa by the British, to Cuba by the Spanish, and to the Philippines by the US. As Aime Cesaire argued, fascism is colonial violence and subjugation, brought home. The Nazi “Brown Shirts” were even named after the surplus colonial Schutztruppe uniforms from Germany’s defunct African empire. ⁠ ⁠ Germany colonised Namibia from 1884 and aimed to create a predominantley white “new African Germany” where the native populations would be put onto reservations and their land distributed among settlers and companies. The nomadic Herero and Nama people in Namibia were brutally oppressed, forced off their land and into slave labour by the settlers. In 1904 the Herero rose up and killed up to 150 Germans. The German response killed between 70-90,000 indigenous people, with survivors placed in concentration camps were they were tortured, starved, enslaved, and had medical experiments performed on them. This was the first genocide of the 20th Century.⁠ ⁠ Germany is (mostly) contrite about the Holocaust, but less forthcoming in remorse or condemnation for their other genocides. It’s almost like they can’t see a genocide unless the perpetrators are […]

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DAILY MAIL / UK LAWYERS FOR ISRAEL

According to the Daily Mail I’ve been reported to the British police by “UK Lawyers for Israel” for designing the BDS supermarket labels (available to download and print here). Y’know how you wait ages for one awful institution full of bastards to have a go and then three come along at once? ⁠ I only just found out about this today since the Daily Mail article came out on Xmas eve. The police haven’t been in touch yet although I don’t really expect anything to come from it.⁠ ⁠ This “UK Lawyers for Israel” is the same group that campaigned to have artwork made by Gazan children removed from a London hospital (see below). Which apparently they were “delighted to report”. And the same group who invited extremists from pro-illegal settler campaign group Regavim to speak in the UK.⁠ ⁠ According to PSC, Regavim was cofounded by an Israeli government MP who is “notorious for homophobic remarks, describing LGBT+ Jews as “beasts”, defended violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians and suggested that Ahed Tamimi, then a 17 year old Palestinian girl arrested for preventing an Israeli soldier illegally entering her home, should be shot in the knee caps.”⁠ Well they certainly all sound like lovely people have a firm grasp of the difference between right and wrong.⁠ ⁠ This has all given me a nudge to get more labels available for download, which I’ll be doing this week! I’ll post about them in my story. I’m also now posting updates on my artwork and links in my new Telegram channel.

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VIOLENCE

My first painting of 2024. This was inspired by the double-standard around violence, not just in Israel’s occupation and destruction of Palestine, but also in the ‘monopoly of violence’ that is held by states, police, militaries, and intelligence agencies, which allows politicians and commentators to claim that “violence is never the answer” when referring to a regular person defending themselves against a police attack, punching a Nazi in the street, or pushing a cream pie into a politician or CEO’s face; but which also allows them to not flinch at the application of unimaginable levels of cruel, and even sadistic, violence as long as the people inflicting that violence wear the correct uniform. The threshold for what constitutes violence is also far lower when the charge is levelled at the general public, rather than those with power. After the overturning of Roe V Wade by the US Supreme Court, when pro-choice activists were peacefully protesting outside the homes of judges, President Biden said “No intimidation. Violence is never acceptable. Threats and intimidation are not speech. We must stand against violence in any form regardless of your rationale.” Implying that a protest was intimidation, and that intimidation was a form of violence. A quote of “Violence is never acceptable” from the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world, and a nation that has been at war for all but eighteen of its 247-year existence, also comes preloaded with its own punchline. This tweet from Aaron Bady on twitter has stayed with me, “The basic (colonial) double standard of the Israel Palestine “conflict” is that any Palestinian violence justifies any Israeli violence, but no Israeli violence ever justifies any Palestinian violence, and once you see it, you’ll never stop seeing it.” He continued, “(personally, I […]

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BDS SUPERMARKET

Anti-apartheid supermarket price tags for products covered by the BDS boycott (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions). These are Sainsbury's (and currently Sabra) specific but I plan to make them for other supermarkets and products and they'll all be available to download and print below.

In the UK the Sabra and Yarden hummus brands are made by Osem, an Israeli company. In the US there is a different Sabra brand which according to the BDS website is "a joint venture between PepsiCo and the Strauss Group, an Israeli food company that provides financial support to the Israeli army."

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OCCUPATION

Football is incredibly popular in Palestine but the occupation makes it difficult to flourish. The Palestine national team faces restrictions on travel and dozens of its most promising players have been frequently imprisoned, injured, permanently disabled, and killed after attacks and raids by Israeli forces. In 2014 two young national team players Jawhar Nasser and Adam Halabiya were shot repeatedly in the feet and legs near an Israeli checkpoint in occupied Palestine. Palestinian football stadiums and fields have been bombed by Israeli forces and sections of the separation wall were built down the middle of the pitch at Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University.

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